While working on implementing new functionality on my online favorites manager ( www.linqto.me ) which I encourage everyone to check out, I came across the following problem:
Given a UserControl, I would like to have an UpdatePanel that would refresh...

This week, together with my colleague Emmanuel, we released a Nuget package called Azure Black IPs that would allow you to track IP addresses that send requests that trigger the ASP.net validation for your websites. Here is a quick video of how to install...

What is the Azure Black IPs Nuget Package.
In a previous post on our blog ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/friis/archive/2014/04/25/easily-detect-and-block-malicious-http-requests-targeting-iis-asp-net-using-blackips.aspx ) we have discussed how we could...

One regular question posed to our team deals with the performance counters set-up to ensure IIS and ASP.Net application(s) are working properly. However, as every web-application and hence every IIS Server, will behave differently depending on what will...

In a previous blog, we explained how to Install IIS Dynamic IP Restrictions in an Azure Web Role . In the present article, we'll provide guidelines to collect data and analyze it to be able to detect potential DOS/DDOS attacks. We'll also provide tips...

In the final article of the series on the dangers of ASP.net background threading, to illustrate the dangers of such an architecture, I will start by introducing one more modification to the code of the sample application. This modification will be added...

To continue the saga of developing ASP.net applications that make use of background threads, we will look at how to 'optimize' the application that I have proposed in the first article. The objective would be to have the application load the data in the...

When debugging memory dumps from customers, I have come to see, quite often, a pattern that you should not use in your application if you don't want to run into trouble. This pattern can be resumed in a simple rule: thou shall not create thy own threads...

One of the most recommended measure during a web application security audit is to encrypt the connectionStrings section from a Web.Config file. If this operation could be quite easy in a single IIS server environment, it could be really difficult in a...

When you write a web role requiring application specific configuration (like assembly binding), you may have a hard time trying to figure out which app configuration file should be used and how to get it deployed and used in your role. This issue has...

In a previous blog, I have detailed how to Install IIS Dynamic IP Restrictions in an Azure Web Role to block DOS attack targeting a web role in Azure. In many situation, an attacker may combine other attacks to DOS such as script injection attacks trying...

A Denial-Of-Service (DOS) attack can target any application/tenant should it be hosted in Windows Azure or hosted by an ISP. If you are using Azure Web Sites or IIS in a VM (IAAS), a simple way to mitigate such attack would be to enable Dynamic IP Restrictions...

In a previous blog article I've detailed how to analyse IIS Logs using Excel. However, when you get very huge logs or when you want to automate this operation, Excel is not the best way to do. It's where LogParser 2.2 takes over. It allows you to parse...

Many times customers are asking us how we analyse IIS logs. We usually use two different approaches. The first one is to use LogParser to parse the IIS logs using a programmation language similar to SQL. This one is not the easiest ways as you need to...

I have seen a couple of support calls recently that seem to center on various customer ASP.net websites that are not working well (or at all) with Internet Explorer 11. The issues are mostly centered on functionality available on the site's pages that...

A new release of HTTPREPLAY/ STRACE is now available at the following location: http://www.microsoft.com/en-ie/download/details.aspx?id=41566 This new release adds compatibility for IE11 on Windows 8.1 or Windows 7. I'm strongly encouraging everybody...

I recently worked on an incident dealing with IIS6/Windows 2003 and IISRESET failing on the 1st attempt with the following error: "Restart attempt failed. Access Denied". The strange thing is that running IISRESET a second time was working with no issue...

While working on my bookmarking site ( www.linqto.me ), I came up against the following problem: how to make Ajax search pages be persistent even after the user navigates away from them, and then comes back. To illustrate this example, go to www.linqto...

I've recently worked on a very interesting file upload issue where my customer was hitting a 2 GB upload limit using Internet Explorer, IIS 7.5 and a simple file upload form with a file input element. After doing some research and a couple of tests, I...

Last weekend I wanted to upgrade my home workstation from Windows 7 Utimate to Windows 8 Professional, so that I could benefit from using the new Windows 8 Hyper-V client for my virtual machines.
I chose to do an in place upgrade from Windows 7 to...